Saturday, January 21, 2012

Home Is What The Heart Is

I challenge you to take a moment now and ask yourself when you first felt at home with yourself. It doesn't have to be one of those wide-awakening moments where you felt fully liberated from insecreities. No. I mean that moment in high school you were suddenly confident walking in your own shoes, or that day in elementary school you had to hold your own.

I did this a few weeks ago, pin-pointed the moment I was home, and I haven't been able to let go of the idea that who I am at this precise moment is founded on one simple occurance.

And I know it sounds pathetic to say I was able as an early adolecent to stand tall because I had my ears wrapped around music by one specific artist. I tried to ignore the notion. There had to be another time I felt at home. Jason Mraz isn't my first notion of inner home, is he?

But I dug, and as obsurd as that makes me, it's the truth. And I stand by it.

Morrissey once said (to paraphrase) "There is one artist that comes into your life at the right moment-at that age-and they change you. And from then on, nothing they ever do can be wrong."

I've analyzed myself over the past few years over how I feel more akin to Mraz's first studio album Waiting for My Rocket to Come or his second studio album Mr. A-Z, and it has recently occured to me that I have given these releases significant importance because they were the first I had. They were the ones that seeped into my heart and created a foundation on which I build my confidence.

The way I see it is, up until 2005, my personality and my strength were swimming about in my body, with no stable place to take root and grow; and something with this man and his music pulled me together. He was like the mortar, cementing bricks of my foundation. For the years interviening I have built more to myself; I have customized who I am and what I believe and what I do and what I love, making the wall of personal definition higher and higher. But it's founded on the base he helped me create.

I think I forget I've built this inner home. I get caught up in the world and all the levels of my towering fortress, and just when I begin to be submerged by all that surrounds me-without even realizing I'm drowning-his song comes in and my heart takes flight, as though the base of my being is reaching out, shaking the structure to remind me who I am and how beautiful that is. And how beautiful it continues to become.

You can laugh at me, and mock me for loving this tree-hugging planet-saving music-playing nomad; but that is just who he has become. That is the result of all his brick laying since he played coffee shops Thursday nights. He is transparent, showing the world in love and song what his inner fortress holds.

And it's only because he's so willing to share and create that I can lean back and say I'm building myself, and say I have an identity. It's just still under construction.

If I never saw him perform live again for the rest of my life, it would disappoint me more than the world. But at the same time I don't need to see his love manifested live. Each cord, each note, each scat is manifestation enough.

I just hope I can find a way, once I know myself, to be so purely open and share the fiber of who I am.